Progress of Russian baseball will be impossible without the Russian League, the country's highest rank of the sport, making a major step forward. The theme has been the focal point of the two-day meetings in Moscow, October 28-29, with participating teams from Moscow, Russia's Far East, St. Peterburg and Yaroslavl.

  With the RL staying within its current Moscow-only format in the near future, the league will try to improve its standard of play by implementing several important changes, including accumulating the best talent by narrowing the playing field to only four or at most five clubs (most probably VVIA, Spartak, Moskvich, MGU plus a RusStar/SKV merged entry), switching to weekly three-game series and thus significantly extending the schedule, eliminating aluminum bats, instituting a technical commissioners office. The key stone will be a successful transformation of the RL clubs into semi-pro organizations able to meet new financial requirements.

  The far eastern teams from Nakhodka, Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Vladivostok, Artemovsk and Khabarovsk, consisting of mostly junior age players, will play a separate schedule.

  Also, the meetings resulted in somewhat unexpected designation of VVIA's playing coach Nikolai Gervasov as the new manager of the Russian National Team, replacing Gennady Abramov, who had guided Team Russia to two consecutive fourth-place finishes at European Championships in 1997 and 1999. But this year's repeat was unimpressive given the team's poor 3-5 record and the coaching staff's having a hard time evaluating its own players. Gervasov's only previous managerial experience was a success, when his SKA MVS (Balashikha) edged SKV for the second place in 1997.

  In other RL news, the MGU ballclub, which had announced its new nickname - Tornado - earlier in October, has been the center of attention. The team have already inked Moskvich catcher Andrei Sazonov, the only Russian Leaguer  to finish in the top 10 in batting each of the last three seasons, and reportedly agreed to terms with the Army club's stars Vladimir Petrov, Andrei Selivanov and Ruslan Nabiev, though the last two were going to spend some time playing in Belgium again next season. MGU might also lure RusStar's Vladimir Muratov.

  Moskvich, meanwhile, quickly compensated for the loss of Sazonov by luring excellent defensive backstop and solid hitter Sergei Solovjev from Spartak and made sure it would retain services of workhorse right-hander Oleg Korneev.